A couple times a year my coworkers and I get together for an evening of... uh... team building. This usually consists of gambling and drinking. I'm not an expert in software methodologies or human relation dynamics, but I'm pretty sure this is a good way to build a software development team.

For the first few years of team building, we went to the Peppermill casino in Reno, which is one of the nicer casinos in Reno (which is not unlike being the fanciest trailer in the park.) One day, however, the Peppermill's Director of Casino Operations tapped me on the shoulder and informed me that I was no longer welcome at their blackjack tables. I had been spotted as a card counter. He said that I could stay at their hotel, eat at their restaurants, play other games, but I was banned from blackjack for life.

For life? Life? I could commit murder and get out of jail in a few decades, but win $50 through card counting and I'm banned FOR LIFE? It's insane. Hardly anything lasts for life. Sure, I'll be a dad for life, and assuming Hank doesn't dump my ass, I'm a husband for life too, but I'm supposed to believe that the third part of that temporal scale trifecta is blackjack banishment?

I followed up with the guy (as did my boss) via emails. We tried to convince him that despite my occasional tiny winnings, the Peppermill still profited from our team-building boondoggles, so it was not in their best interests to ban me from blackjack (for life!). They replied, suggesting that the rest of our team was welcome to play blackjack while I did other things. Since that basically amounted to a team-debuilding activity, we vowed never to return.

This was about 6 years ago. We've visited other casinos since then, but none of them quite measured up to our fond memories of the 'Mill.

Yesterday, however, I received this promotional letter in the mail from the Peppermill:

For those of you too lazy to click on the image, here are the salient points. It starts out by saying:

Dear Michael,

On behalf of the Peppermill, I would like to personally invite you to "Come Back Home" and stay with us, because quite frankly, we miss you!

You hear that? They invite me to come back because THEY MISS ME! I've never received such a sincere sounding letter even from my wife. It continued by saying:

Start your stay off with lots of luck by enjoying $100 in Peppermill FREE PLAY to play on your favorite games.

My favorite game? That would be BLACKJACK! Woo hoo! They closed out the letter with:

We look forward to your return, because we've missed you!

I'm misting up over here! I've missed you too, you banishing bastards!

I'm pretty sure this letter is a prime example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand kicks out of the casino, but it has been six years. I'm not public enemy number one. I'm just a really crappy card counter.

I'm really tempted. Maybe they'll kick me back out, but won't that make a great blog post?

I roamed around trying to be social at Daisy's back-to-school picnic earlier this month. One woman, Monica, with whom I've chatted a couple times, was seated at one of the informational tables. She greeted me warmly and patted the seat next to her. I plopped down.

Monica was trying to get people to sign up for various volunteer jobs at the upcoming school fundraiser. It was a thankless job, but she soldiered on, hitting up each passing parent in between bits of chit-chat with me.

We had a nice little conversation and she expressed some surprise at how hard it was to sign up volunteers for such easy jobs. Being a human-in-training, I expressed sympathy and asked contextual questions about the jobs and blah blah blah. The next thing you know, I'm staring at a job description, politely saying, "Shoot, that doesn't sound so hard." She smiled and nudged the sign-up form towards me.

Doh! I had been suckered! This was two years in a row that this woman did this to me. Last year she corralled me into doing trash runs and clean-up with her after the picnic and now I was signing up to be a... phone solicitor!

AAAAAAAH! Or, to paraphrase Skot:

JESUS FREAKIN' BEEKEEPING CHRIST!

How on earth did I get suckered into being the lowest of the low? The slimiest of the slime! The damndest of the damned! Unbeekeepinglievable. I've become what I detest!

So, tonight I began my descent into hell. I studied my script and began calling all the parents in my daughter's class. I was supposed to remind them of the upcoming fund-raiser, and our fund-raising goals, and ask them if they'd be willing to sign up for any of the remaining jobs.

I've called about 15 parents so far. I've been hung up on once (in MID SPIEL!) and rudely refused another time. The first time I actually got a friendly person, I got so flustered, I forgot to ask her to volunteer for any jobs. And, of course, I forgot to tell every single person about the fund-raising goal for each family. Nice work, Mike!

Two minutes after I quit for the evening, my phone rang.

Me: Hello?
Person: ....
Me: Hallloooooooo?
Person: Hi, this is Wayne calling from the Window Factory. How are you doing tonight?
Me: Oh, ducky, just ducky.
Wayne: Great. I'm calling to tell you about our new green windows. We have a deal where you can get our these great new windows and a $100 rebate...
Me: Wayne, I'll tell you what. I've had a rough night, so I'll meet you half way here. I'll take your $100 AND I'll let you keep the windows. How's that?
Wayne: (laughing) Well, we can replace ALL the windows in your house for no money down and no payments for TWELVE MONTHS! How does that sound?
Me: Wayne, accept my offer now before it completely disappears. Right now you can still give me $200 and keep your windows FOR TWELVE....

Then Wayne hung up on me. Pfffft. I've been hung up worse than that.

Daisy gets to watch a little TV most days. I realize that better parents would have their kids composing symphonies, or feeding the poor, or composing symphonies for the poor, but that's just now how things worked out in our house. I may be a liberal, but I firmly believe that the poor should compose their own symphonies. Bootstraps, baby.

Anyway, the other day Daisy was perusing the Tivo "Now Playing" list, picking a show to watch. She clicked over to the group of "Magic School Bus" episodes that were available. It's her favorite show, but she's seen every episode multiple times. Hank watched her scroll through the episode descriptions from the kitchen.

"Oh, not that one," Hank muttered quietly to herself, "she's seen that a million times. Good god, not that one either. Ugh, she's seen these all so many times. What a terrible choice." Hank sighed.

Meanwhile, from the living room, Daisy sighed.

"They're all so good," Daisy muttered to herself. "How can I pick?"

Thankfully Daisy made the tough decision and picked an episode, but, still, it makes me shake my head. Daisy will HAPPILY watch the same TV or movie over and over again. She has, more often than not, finished watching a movie and then immediately asked to watch it all over again. When picking a book to read, she's more likely to choose a favorite off the shelf than dig into a new one.

What the hell?!?

I will grant you that during my youth, I saw every episode of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's island more times than I care to admit, but in my day we had about 4 channels. So, there just weren't very many options. If there had been another show aimed at the mental level of an 8 year-old, I would have watched that instead of subjecting myself to the queasy feeling I'd get every time the Brady's picked up that damn tiki idol.

Not Daisy though. When I saw her reading a book for the third or fourth time the other day, I interrogated her about why she was doing that instead of reaching for one of the interesting new books she had received for her birthday.

Me: You JUST finished that book. Why are you reading it again?
Daisy: I like it!
Me: I know. It's a good book. But you have some new books to read that look pretty good too.
Daisy: I know.
Me: Wouldn't you rather read a book where you don't know what's going to happen?
Daisy: Then I wouldn't know what was going to happen.

Man, that is just weird. I think this comes from the same part of her personality that only likes stories where good things happen instead of conflict and resolution. It's some crazy fear of the unknown. The classic Daisy story probably goes like this:

Chapter 1: Baby kitten becomes best friends with baby bunny.
Chapter 2: Baby kitten and baby bunny open a rainbow and candy store together.
Chapter 3: Big musical number about togetherness

She'd watch that endlessly. Here in our corner of the world, there is no Joseph Campbell classic myth. There are only rainbows and candy.

There are bigger problems to solve, but this one is perplexing.

Programming is mostly a solitary activity. It's typically just a man (or woman), a computer, and a nearly limitless supply of furry porn. This is how my ancestors programmed computers.

Recently, however, a programming technique called "pair programming" has become fashionable. It's a simple idea, pairing together two programmers, who work as team. One person types while the other person thinks and guides. This is supposed to result in all sorts of benefits including higher quality code (two brains are better than one) and having more than one person familiar with how it all works.

On my most recent project, I've been doing pair programming with one of my coworkers, Ralph. We've been doing this for several weeks now. Since we both work from home, we've been on the phone together all day long, using collaborative desktop sharing software to let us jointly stare at either my computer desktop or his. We're essentially joined at the ear.

Ralph and I already had a fair amount in common. We're both about the same age. We're both dads, and we're both Jewish, although he's way more Jew and I'm much more Ish. This pair programming effort, however, has bonded us in new ways.

First off, we've had to synchronize our schedules. To maximize the efficiency of our work day, we take lunch at the same time, we refill our coffee cups at the same time, and we take dumps at the same time. (Granted, due to the mobility of my cordless phone and headset, I could take a dump WHILE Ralph "drove" the keyboard, but a modicum of decorum exists even among computer programmers.)

When my boss interrupted us via Instant Messenger last week, we had this conversation:

Boss: When you and Ralph get tired of each other, I need a few minutes of your time.
Me: We're knee deep in crap right now. Can we call you in 30 minutes?
Boss: Ok. I notice that your personal pronoun of choice is is always "we". You and Ralph have become one.
Me: Resistance is futile.

Although pair programming is rewarding, it's weird having a partner in my work day much as I have a partner in my marriage. Of course there are differences. For example, my wife and I don't ALWAYS defecate at the same time.

Ralph and I, however, are looking forward to synchronizing our menstrual cycles.

A conversation I had with my wife this morning:

Me: (reading the paper) Looks like Yom Kippur starts tonight. Are you ready?
Hank: Oh, yes. I'm preparing all the traditional Yom Kippur foods.
Me: .... Um, I think you're done then.
Hank: I am? Oh. Wait. Is this the holiday where...
Me: You fast? Yes.
Hank: I ...uh...
Me: When you said that line about preparing the foods, I couldn't tell if you were being really clever. I guess not.

I approached the sandwich bar at the hospital cafeteria cautiously. I had eaten a pre-prepared sandwich the previous day and it tasted like ass, horseradishy ass, but ass nevertheless. This time I hoped for a better sandwich by building my own, using ingredients like turkey instead of sphincter.

My mother stood along side me.

"It's a very nice sandwich bar, isn't it?" she asked cheerfully.

My mother loves all food. She'll happily eat spicy food, bland food, good food, bad food, food in a box with a fox, orange peels, and maybe cardboard. I cannot recall her ever saying, "This tastes like ass."

If you give her a glass of some flavored liquid, say juice or wine, it will be so overpoweringly delicious to her, that she will dilute the flavor by adding water. You can feed her the richest chocolate cake, or a cracker, and she will ooh and aah equally over them both.

If that hospital sandwich bar had only contained two items: grey cardboard and dark grey cardboard, she would have said, "Goodness! Two kinds of cardboard? This is very nice sandwich bar, isn't it?" Then she would have poured a little water on her boardwich and thoroughly enjoyed her meal.

I contemplated her semi-rhetorical question to me. It wasn't a horrible sandwich bar. There were several kinds of bread, a couple kinds of meat, two kinds of cheese, lettuce and tomato. It was definitely adequate, but "very nice?" There was no sourdough!

Then again, did it really matter what I thought? My father had just had a heart attack and my mother was spending virtually all her time at the hospital. Maybe it was time for me to put aside my curmudgeon tendencies just once and let her enjoy her meal. Would it be so hard for me to be a thoughtful son?

"This is NOT a very nice sandwich bar," I replied.

Crap.

"Well, I think it's a very nice sandwich bar."

On the bright side of things, my father is being released from the hospital. I promise that if he ever gets readmitted there, I'll lie to my mother about enjoying the cafeteria. I hope I never have the chance though.

My father is staying in a nice hospital. It's clean, modern, and the employees appear to be competent and helpful. It's the sort of place you'd want to be, if, for example, you were suffering through a massive heart attack where your major artery got blocked, hypothetically speaking. It is not the sort of place you'd want to be if, however, you were the squeamish son of someone who just suffered through a massive heart attack, hypothetically speaking.

I walked up to the hospital entrance yesterday, non-hypothetically speaking, dreading my visit. I don't care much for doctors, health care, or the general entropic processes which slowly degrade our bodies over time. Hospitals are the embodiment of all these unlikable things. In fact, hospitals are the Unhappiest Place on Earth.

Nobody looks forward to going to a hospital. No one has a good time there. If there's a ride involved, it's probably the worst ride of your life. The only good part about your visit is when you leave, and that's only if you leave with your eyes open.

Visitors shuffled through the hallways looking either grim, nervous, or faking bravery. Hospital residents were wheeled from place to place generally looking dead. Employees of the facility were a mixed lot, some radiating artificially generated spunkiness, while others exuded profound resignation from deep within their souls.

Even the cafeteria was miserable. The featured entrees on Saturday were an unappetizing beef brisket and and some anemic-looking honey fried chicken. It seemed criminal to serve unhealthy food at a health care facility, but I guess everyone needs job security.

My father nagged me during my visit today. He knew he had a captive audience. He begged me to have a cholesterol test, frequent check-ups, and just because he's sadistic, regular colonoscopies. I normally do my best to ignore my father's advice (it's how I prove I'm all growed up!), but if it'll keep me away from the hospital, maybe I'll consider it.

My father had a heart attack yesterday afternoon. It looks like he's going to be ok though.

He was at home with my mom and began to feel some serious indigestion pains. The pain quickly got worse and was accompanied by shortness of breath. At that point my mother wisely called 911.

The U.S. medical establishment seems to be optimized for this very situation.

Within minutes an ambulance had arrived and an EMT began gathering information. Shortly thereafter they delivered my father to a nearby hospital where an angiogram was performed, confirming my father had had a heart attack, with one artery completely blocked and another 80% blocked. The doctors immediately did an angioplasty, which is where they expand balloons in the blocked arteries (my layman's understanding) to reestablish blood flow. As part of the procedure, they also inserted stents, small metal tubes, into the arteries, to keep them from collapsing closed again. The stents are permanent.

The doctor estimated that it was 83 minutes from the time my father had a heart attack to the time they fixed his arteries. Amazing. I've waited longer than that to get a pizza delivered.

I visited my dad in the hospital today. He was very tired, and looked like hell, but was in a pretty good mood, all things considered.

He told me how when my mother called 911, he made sure to grab his wallet. Then, when the EMT asked him if he was on any medication or allergic to any medications, my father was able to pull out the typed document that he keeps in his wallet for exactly this situation.

My father is also very rigorous about keeping his financial records. Several times a year, he pulls me aside to explain to me how to access his financial spreadsheets on his computer should he become incapacitated, or dead. Apparently, the day before his heart attack, he had updated his spreadsheets with his latest information. He said that while he was in the ambulance, wondering if he was going to die or not, he couldn't help but be a little smug that his records were in order. He knew he could die with a clear conscience.

The U.S. medical establishment may be good at handling heart attacks, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone better prepared for having them than my father.

*toot* *toot*
*toot* *toot*

What's that sound, you ask? No, it's not from beans, the magical fruit. It's from my own horn. I'm tooting it.

*toot* *toot*

Hank returns back from her 5 day business trip tonight and I have, once again, kept the child alive in her absence. Daisy is totally not dead, which is different from undead, which she is also not. I'm two for two!

Usually the hardest thing about Hank being gone is feeding Daisy. Hank is good with food. She can improvise a meal, macgyvering one out of whatever she finds in the kitchen, like, for example, cracker crumbs, orange peels, and dead skin cells. Voila! Breaded epidermis ala o'range. I don't have those cooking improvisational skills. So, the day before Hank left, I sat down and thought about every breakfast, lunch, and dinner I'd have to feed to the kid for the next 5 days, and I grocery shopped to that list.

(Note that I didn't set the bar very high for myself. Out of the 5 dinners I had to "make" on my list, one of them was "Go out to eat!" and another was "Order food to be delivered!". Hey, there's a reason people keep a phone in their kitchen. It's a kitchen tool as important as your lemon zesters or stoves.)

The end result was that the week went pretty damn smoothly. So, not only did you get to hear my toots, but what you didn't been hear all week was me complaining about taking care of Daisy in Hank's absence.

That being said, don't go away again, Hank.

In computer programming there is an activity known as "refactoring". It's when you take existing code and you reorganize it so that sections are more logically grouped, it has less duplication, there are fewer unneeded parts, and it's just plain easier to read. This is similar to the "factoring" we used to do in algebra where we'd take some mathematical expression and break it down into its components.

Of course in computer science, you don't factor, you REfactor, which as near as I can tell, is some kind of ironic name. If you're REfactoring, that implies that the code had already been factored into logical parts in the first place. Judging by all the code that I've ever been asked to refactor, if it was factored in the first place, it was done so by skittish chihuahuas, and not the smart kind either.

Actually, that's not entirely true. My team at work inherited a program that has perplexed us for the last year and a half. We try to add the simplest features to it and we're constantly stymied by its byzantine organization. I honestly cannot tell if it was written by idiots or geniuses. Were they chihuahuas, yipping and yelping their way into 1000-line methods, or savants who did not feel the need to structure the code in traditional hu-man ways? Only the ancients know for sure.

At separate times each member of our team has found themselves with a free afternoon and has tried to untangle small parts of the program. We'd start following a thread, carefully pulling it and saying positive affirmations, and after a few hours we'd find ourselves convulsing and completely wrapped in spaghetti. We'd apologize to the software gods for our hubris, remove our changes, and slowly back away from the keyboard.

Recently, however, thanks to the methodical deliberating by our new German overlords and a lucky confluence of scheduling holes, our team has found ourselves with a couple of weeks to fill as we see fit. Although I unsuccessfully lobbied for a thorough investigation of this alleged Internet porn-o-graphy I've heard so much about, instead it was decided that we should attack the software that had vexed us for 18 months and refactor it into submission. Since the program code was bigger than any one of our brains, my boss assigned two of us to the task.

So, for the last couple weeks, I've spent the entire workday on the phone with a coworker, jointly analyzing code on a software archaeological dig. I can say, with a surprising amount of sincerity, that this has been the most rewarding thing I've done at work in a long time.

In the past, we'd try to add some tiny thing to the code, sort of like adding a bell to the handlebars of a tricycle, and we'd get tripped up by something totally unexpected, like for example, finding a bunch of snakes slithering around the handlebars.

"SNAKES!" we'd scream, but we'd fear removing the snakes because they'd have a sign right next to them saying something like "Don't remove these, or the tricycle will crash!"

What? Crap. Ok.

And we'd leave the snakes in place, carefully placing the bell on the back wheel, as far away as possible from the snakes. And then our customers would ride away on the tricycle, denting and dinging the bell each time the back wheel made a rotation. And we'd mark off that to-do item on the big spreadsheet. Done.

Not this time though! This time we're actually staring at the tricycle and the maintenance history long enough to say, "Ohhhh! They didn't mean to put snakes on this trike. They meant to add BRAKES!" So we're finally removing the snakes after 18 months of being repeatedly bitten. How the chihuahuas got the snakes in there in the first place is still a mystery, but, whatever.

As it turns out, removing parts of a program is pretty much the most satisfying thing one can do to software, short of deleting it entirely. Imagine staring at your car engine for a week, and eventually saying, "Oh, this really hot part in the middle is unnecessary" and being right. It restores your faith in the universe.

Now all I need to do is refactor this blog post. Maybe next year.

Recently, the mid-sized unsuccessful company I work for was purchased by a larger and successful company. Nobody was quite sure what to make of this news. On one hand, success good. On the other hand, change bad. We fearses changeseses.

What makes this change a bit uncomfortable is that the new company is based in Germany.

Now, I'm a forgiving guy. I understand that WWI was a long time ago, and as for WWII, well who among us hasn't made the same mistake twice? I can even ignore the slaughter of large chunks of my own family tree, including branches alarmingly close to my own twig, because I'm a "Fool me twice? Ok! Best 3 of 5!" type of guy.

It was unnerving, however, listening to speeches made by our new German CEO speaking about how our "merger" vill allow us to grow to a billion dollar company, how after our corporate unification, ve vill DOMINATE our industry!

I cringed listening to this speech, doing my best to suppress images of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove and his Tourette's-like Nazi spasms. Just spooky.

Meanwhile, the Germans have been making trips out to our local office to try and show us German culture. One day, one of the top technical mucky-mucks, came by to tell us what's like working with people of different nationalities. He explained that he had been working with people around the world for many years and had gathered much wisdom.

"Many times when I worked with the Japanese, they would fall asleep in meetings," he lectured. "I discovered, however, that is not because they are lazy, NO! It is the opposite. It is because they work all night and are exhausted!" He nodded knowingly at one of the Asian employees in the room.

"Now, the Indians will also work very hard. It is because they are all trying to come to America!" With that proclamation, the German executive pointed at one of the Indian employees in the room, and then at another, smiling broadly in the certainty that he had proved his point.

Welcome to the brave new world of efficiency and stereotypes and efficiently communicated stereotypes!

A month later the top human resources executive came to town to teach us specifically about the differences between Germans and Americans. We learned that Americans are shoot-from-the-hip cowboys, writing software using our gut and intuition. We're like Bruce Willis with a keyboard. Germans are of course methodical, and maybe world-war prone (but who isn't these days?)

She summed it up with a slide showing a peach and a walnut. The concept was that these two pieces of food symbolized how Germans saw the difference between our social styles. Americans were like the peaches. We are fuzzy and sweet on the outside, which makes us very accessible. We'll high-five you and ask you about your day. Our sweetness, however, is not perceived to go very deep. If someone actually tells us about their day, they'll soon bite into our hard bitter pit.

Germans see themselves as walnuts. Sure, they're a tough nut to crack, but once you get past that shell, you get to the meat, filled with nutritious protein.

You know, we had a lot of walnut trees where I grew up as a kid. They are bitter horrible nuts, perhaps the worst of the nut family.

Welcome to the new world order.

I went grocery shopping yesterday at the small market in our neighborhood. I don't usually buy the week's worth of groceries at this local market because it's a bit more expensive than the local supermarket, but that's just how things worked out. However, there were a couple of bottles of booze on my shopping list and it looked like booze was going to be significantly more expensive there, so I made a mental note to just buy the liquor the next time I was at the supermarket.

I'm much more likely to have a beer with my dinner than some fancy cocktail, but sometimes you just gotta have a martini, especially on Friday nights when we usually have guests for dinner and drinks. We also host the occasional margarita and taco night, which requires a fair amount of tequila and triple sec.

This afternoon I found myself right by the supermarket. After dropping Hank off at the airport this morning, I took Daisy to her school's annual Back to School picnic, which was held at a park next to our Safeway. It was a PTA-sponsored event, so I pitched in with some of the picnic chores, and wore a PTA name tag, and generally tried to be genial (which, of course, in my case meant making fun of children, and mocking people for their religious faith.)

At the end of the picnic, I grabbed Daisy, and headed to Safeway for some booze and two items that I had failed to get the previous day, some turkey sausage and sugar snap peas. Booze doesn't spoil, so it always makes sense to buy the big bottle. Consequently, my shopping cart consisted of one package of sausage, one small bag of sugar snap peas, a big bottle of triple sec, and an enormous bottle of gin.

The problem with this plan was that EVERYONE went from the picnic to the Safeway. I'm dragging Daisy through the booze and bread aisle (don't ask me why they go together), chatting with the fellow parents while they grab whole wheat bread and I grab the biggest bottle of gin on the shelf. At least if I had been buying vodka, that could have still been for a foo-foo drink like a cosmopolitan. Vodka comes in fruity infusions and is used in a variety of sweet beverages. Gin, on the other hand, just pretty much says, "Hi, I'm a drunk". My PTA name tag, still prominently displayed, filled in the rest of the biography.

Super. So, now I'm the big drunk parent. I'd just explained to everyone in at the picnic how I'm taking care of Daisy alone for 5 days while Hank is out of town, and 5 minutes later, there I am at Safeway buying the novelty sized bottle of gin.

The parent behind me in line at the checkout counter quietly asked Daisy what we were having for dinner and I was tired of being defensive at that point.

"GIN!" I blurted out. "We're having GIN for dinner. She loves GIN!"

"I see that," he said, somewhat taken aback.

We had home-made fried chicken and steamed broccoli for dinner. I had a beer. Daisy had ice water.

Ahhhh, the wife just left town for a five day business trip.

Obviously I am looking forward to a few days of bachelorhood, including but not limited to: daily drunkenness, dirty laundry stuffed into nontraditional nooks and crannies (honestly, is there any rule that a dishwasher ONLY washes dishes?), and, most importantly, hot and cold running chicks. The ladies, they love the unkempt man.

I cannot think of any reason why this week can't be Mike's Big Irresponsible Week of Bachelorhood and Middle Life Crisis. (MBIWBMLC ™). Yes, that's what it will be.

That is, as soon as I choose which way to take care of Daisy for the week. So far, my top choices are:

1) Temporary cryogenic freezing (ala Ted Williams)
2) Carbonite freezing (ala Han Solo)
3) Freezer freezing (ala... she'd be setting a trend here)

So, yeehaw, all I need to do is pick an option, and then the debauchery of MBIWBMLC ™ begins!

Hank and I strode up to the hotel where her 25 Year High School reunion was being held. We prepared ourselves to crash it. The following actions were on our to-do list:

1. Concoct a scheme for breaking into the event
2. De-sober-ize
3. Craft ridiculous alter ego for me

After getting a couple of martinis from the hotel bar, we scouted the reunion room. We noted that a sit-down dinner was provided and people were expected to wear name tags. The name tags were pre-made and were displayed on a check-in that was staffed by a couple of dupable-looking people.

Me: So, what's our story here? How do we get these people to let us in?
Hank: I'll say that I lost my invitation.
Me: No. Say that you never received your invitation. That's even the truth! Be indignant! Say that your family moved a lot.
Hank: That's good.
Mike: Yeah, it is. I'm sure lots of folks just aren't easily trackable. There's no need to mention that you didn't graduate from here. You just never got your invitation. Also, I'm going to be an astronaut.
Hank: Ok.

We marched up to the table and Hank guiltily stammered, "I don't have my invitation!"

I glared at her.

"Can we buy tickets now?" she begged.

The check-in folks happily agreed, and for the low low price of $70 (each!), they scribbled our names onto some stickers and handed them to us. Now officially stickered, Hank and I legitimately wandered our way into the dining room. Within moments the senior class president swooped down to investigate who we were. She and Hank had no memory of each other, but she seemed like a nice enough woman. I steeled myself for the next set of lies, placing the phrases "I'm an astronaut" and "NASA recruited me for my sperm motility" on the tip of my tongue.

"So, what do you do you guys do for a living?" I casually asked the president and her husband.

"We're both pilots" she replied.

"I'mAComputerProgrammer!" I blurted out instantly.

And that's how we "crashed" the reunion. As it turns out, 25 year high school reunions in suburban Maryland just aren't that exclusive. And I'm a terrible astronaut.

The rest of the evening really didn't get any more exciting. Although I did tell my share of lies, none of them were terribly interesting. I was usually pretending to

• Know about something that I didn't (e.g. flooring installation or NCAA football)
• Be the guy who made fun of people in high school instead of the guy people made fun of

Both of those are pretty big stretches for me, but I was emboldened by the open bar. I had figured that I failed miserably on both fronts, but I did receive text message the next day from a husband of one of Hank's friends, where he mockingly pretended to be one of the personality-free guys we had chatted with the previous evening.

So, maybe I can't pull off the astronaut thing, but I can still find new ways to be a jerk. That's pretty cool.

So, I'm in Maryland, and tonight we will attempt to crash a high school reunion. Hank did not graduate from this high school (spent freshman and sophomore years there) and in fact did not graduate from any high school, but that's a story for another day. Regardless, we're going to show up and look like we belong. Something tells me we're going to spend the evening in the hotel bar, but you never know.

Last night we attended a cocktail party put on by one of Hank's old school-mates, whom she hadn't seen in about 25 years. It was odd being at a party where I knew absolutely no one except Hank, but I wanted to let her mingle, and I didn't want to seem like an asshole, so I did my best to mingle.

For most of the time I was conversationally trapped by a fellow electrical engineer. Neither one of us actually does electrical engineering, instead we both do things more boring. In fact, if we had a Whose Job Is More Boring contest, it would be a tightly contested match. HOWEVER, at least I know that my job is boring and I won't bore others with my version of tales of security standards at water utility plants. Trust me, I've just made his job sound much more interesting than he did.

My first conversation, which was much more interesting, was with one of Hank's ex-friends who promptly introduced herself as a bitter divorcee.

Divorcee: Oh, I know it's not PC to be bitter.
Me: I don't think it's really a PC issue. It's not a case of offending someone by being bitter. It's just how you feel. You feel bitter.
Divorcee: Oh, god. You really are from California.

Tonight, more of same. I can't be a trophy husband, but maybe I can convince people that Hank didn't marry a prick.